About Me

[in a cabin in the mountains, Jim wakes up and bangs his head on the table he was sleeping under]
Alex Rieger: Jim, are you alright?
"Reverend" Jim Ignatowski: Yeah...uh ... who are you?
Alex Rieger: I'm Alex. We're friends, we work together.
"Reverend" Jim Ignatowski: What? are we, lumberjacks?
Alex Rieger: No, we're cabdrivers.
"Reverend" Jim Ignatowski: I bet we don't do much business up here!

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Thursday, June 30, 2011

This site has some interesting old instruments. It's also got possibly the longest URL I've ever cut and pasted. The darned computer monitor shook when I pasted it.

It's the MUSEUM ARTIFACTS of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and they made the mistake of soliciting comments should anyone recognize a piece of equipment. Isn't that just asking for someone like me to write,"Dear Lord, the picture shows that you've got the Sastry Box set to seventeen! Quick, get everyone out of the building and into decontamination as soon as possible!"

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Did you read Walter Russell Mead's excellent article on the failure of Al Gore? Mead hits the nail squarely on the head:

You can be a leading environmentalist and fail to pay all of your taxes. You can be a leading environmentalist and be unkind to your aged mother. You can be a leading environmentalist and squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, park in the handicapped spots at the mall or scribble angry marginal notes in library books.

But you cannot be a leading environmentalist who hopes to lead the general public into a long and difficult struggle for sacrifice and fundamental change if your own conduct is so flagrantly inconsistent with the green gospel you profess. If the heart of your message is that the peril of climate change is so imminent and so overwhelming that the entire political and social system of the world must change, now, you cannot fly on private jets. You cannot own multiple mansions. You cannot even become enormously rich investing in companies that will profit if the policies you advocate are put into place.

It is not enough to buy carbon offsets (aka “indulgences”) with your vast wealth, not enough to power your luxurious mansions with exotic low impact energy sources the average person could not afford, not enough to argue that you only needed the jet so that you could promote your earth-saving film.

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses....

...To make the case for a proposition like this, one needs to make the following argument: that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high, that the proposed measures are both feasible and effective, and that there are no easier or cheaper methods of accomplishing the goal. This is no special set of high hurdles invented for the purpose of frustrating the greens; it is the basic test that any proposal in any arena must pass.

Carbon regulation only sounded good as a vague concept. When you get down to it, corporations and people are the same - they aren't going to change their way of life unless compelled to do so by a significant force.

Carbon trading and regulation wasn't a nudge in the right direction. In order to work it would have to be a club, coming down to smite anyone who resisted. A nudge would have been a business expense. In order to work, carbon regulation would have to crush whole industries.

It was funny that Obama called for America to "up your game" while touring Alcoa Aluminum. Aluminum production is one of the most energy intensive industries you'll find. Given a free hand in the matter, Obama would would make aluminum a metal for the rich. They'd have aluminum walking sticks and monocles, we'd have stories for the grandkids about how we used to drink soda from aluminum cans.

I shudder to think what Obama and the EPA would do if given a free hand. Thankfully we took the House, and are in a position to cut funding to the stupidest of ideas. Now if we can take back the Senate and the presidency we can begin the task of undoing this blasted utopia.

How is it that they get stung so easily? Because they're there for the abortions, plain and simple. They can pretend that abortions are just a small part of what they do, but the front office operates in public so it's not hard to show what they do.

Here's an interesting article about designing sound into (5) products we use everyday:

A car door is essentially a hollow shell with parts placed inside it. Without careful design the door frame amplifies the rattling of mechanisms inside. Car companies know that if buyers don’t get a satisfying thud when they close the door, it dents their confidence in the entire vehicle.

To produce the ideal clunk, car doors are designed to minimise the amount of high frequencies produced (we associate them with fragility and weakness) and emphasise low, bass-heavy frequencies that suggest solidity.

Reminds me of the phones back in the days when there was only one phone company. That was Bell Telephone, and when I was a kid they offered one phone, the model 500. In the 60's they introduced the Trimline and Princess phones (the "gay phone" lines), but mainly everyone had the 500.

They were almost Soviet in design, no pretty in them, but they were solid and had the kind of heft that could put an unwary intruder into a coma should you choose to defend your home with Ma Bell's property.

Anyway, in 1970-something I had occasion to work in the recycling center for these phones. (the phone company actually rented you the phone back then; you couldn't own your own) In the warehouse, returned and damaged phones would come in on a belt and various parts would be replaced as needed.

So on one job I found a handset in the aisle where I was working. Not wanting anyone to break a toe on this rogue phone, I picked it up. But something was wrong. The darned thing only weighed a few ounces. It wasn't the hefty flail I had imagined I could fight off burglars with. So I asked one of the phone sanitizers I had gotten to know on the job. "Was this some kind of joke handset? A pretend phone of some kind?"

So she showed me Ma Bell's trick: All the phones were like that; so to give the customer the feeling that his rented phone actually had substance, they would put a bag of sand in the handle. It worked too. With the sand you had a phone; without it, the thing felt like a toy.

For some reason I felt betrayed by this simple deception. You mean all those years I was paying a dollar a month to rent this cheap, plastic, ugly device?

But it was the same thing as the car doors. Sure, it's misleading, but it gives you the impression that everything is solid. Stuff is dense and firm and nothing is going to break.

Sort of like a president that sounds good, intelligent, and caring; even though you know that there's nothing on the inside but a bag of sand, and sometimes chili dogs.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

I originally put the prez into this shirt because I liked the design. In fact, it looks much like something I might wear, with possibly the addition of a top hat and a monocle. But after completion, the image reminded me of a superhero, or perhaps super-villain.

Whatcha think? Dr. O, able to crash markets and make assets evaporate? Or maybe, Absolute Zero, destroyer of worlds?

Monday, June 20, 2011

At what point do you suppose police will start trying to catch copper/aluminum/lead thieves? Oh sure they're ready to arrest anyone they see chopping down telephone poles, but when do you think they'll send someone around to the recyclers and ask about junkies selling carloads of utility wiring? This stuff is getting out of hand:

ANTIOCH (KCBS) – Just days after Pacific Gas and Electric lamented the ongoing and widespread theft of copper wire from its Antioch power poles, the utility is now revealing that a particularly brazen thief – or thieves – stole an entire transformer from a power pole.

This is in addition to the knocking down of an estimated 300 power poles, stripping them of their lucrative copper wiring.

So some thief gets $500 and some community gets a bill for $50,000.

Doesn't it raise an alarm when a citizen shows up to sell a utility transformer? Seems like a little poking around the scrap yards could put the fear of God into the recyclers. Stolen property is stolen property right? You can go to jail for it. I can't believe the police are ignoring the one place all this stolen material must end up.

The recycling industry is already regulated up to their eyeballs. Requiring them to report suspicious activity seems like a no-brainer.

It's odd. One of the coolest things about Al Gores' high speed digital intertubium is that you can find images that were made long before the first transistor. Think about it - it's 1948 and you're a government agency concerned about the epidemic of flaming babies in the nation's kitchens. Well, why not advertise in Life magazine? Just that much better if your ad can go on to live in the cloud, warning mothers not yet born about the dangers of setting the baby on the stove.

And thanks to the vast infocloud, nobody will ever again have to wonder about the best way to milk a snake. Not if they own an old doorbell and a computer.

Icing on the cake: getting to point out that the reason the Russians want Obama reelected is because they like one-sided treaties that require nothing from them. They, too, don't put the interests of the United States first.

I have a policy of disclosing whenever one of my photoshops draws heavily on someone else's depiction of an old woman in undergarments and a Viking style Spangenhelm helmet, so, I should probably note that this indeed is one that used much from an existing image of an old lady in undergarments and a Spangenhelm helmet. So there, that's done.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

This is an interesting site. It has pictures of historical figures with people you wouldn't expect, or in surprising places. Missing: Barney Frank in church and Al Franken in front of a laughing audience. (though I'm told that 20 or 30 years ago Al was able to elicit at least nervous laughter)

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

ASTANA — Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday joined the Chinese and Russian leaders in a rare encounter at a summit in Kazakhstan, where he launched a new attack on the "slavers and colonisers" of the West.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Well and good, but now I want to hear the scientific blasphemy. Performing the evolution thought experiment in my mind, with a lay person's exposure to the science, I notice many things that don't seem to make sense. That doesn't mean they can't be explained, I just haven't looked into them enough yet.

But at least I can look into them, because I have an open mind on the matter. What a waste that most students learning the science are hobbled by the theory being locked-down. "We have a consensus now kid; quit asking questions."

Seems like the same thing impedes climate science. Thankfully some scientists still remember what science was supposed to be.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

This is fun. I've been at the New York Times Get Sarah Palin Site, where you're supposed to read some of Sarah Palin's 24,000 emails and flag the ones in which she finally admits to worshiping Satan. I've been randomly flagging the longer ones and commenting stuff like:

So she did have meetings with Bill Bjork. This could be the smoking gun.

I also looked for embarrassing ones to flag as "nothing here" but I couldn't find anything in the least bit scandalous.

OK I know it's juvenile, but I got a kick out of adding to the fatigue of those odious trolls, pouring over the mundane, looking for nasty.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Shelton links to this well written Wired story: sort of a Who-done-it for Nerds.

Our hero:

When James Scott attended the first day of a mycology course as a freshman in college, his plan was to cut class for the rest of the semester and fake his way through on borrowed notes. But in his lecture that day, the professor told a story about a fungus that lives on peach pits. No one, he said, knows how the fungus gets from one pit to the next. “If you go to an abandoned orchard and lie on your stomach under a tree for a week, watching which insects land on a peach and move to another one,” Scott remembers him saying, “you will know more about this fungus than anyone in the world.”

“It was something even I, an undergraduate who didn’t know anything, could do,” Scott says. “I could go out there and look for stuff.” In the space of one anecdote, Scott had become the sort of person who kept a microscope in his dorm room and decorated the walls with fungal family trees he drew himself. (He also plays the banjo.)

Plays banjo too? Hey, you had me at "cut class for the rest of the semester."

TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - An Ohio restaurant mentioned last week by President Barack Obama as an indirect beneficiary of the government's Chrysler bailout will go out of business Sunday after a more than 70-year history.

Co-owner Richard Lawrence of New Chet's Restaurant in Toledo says business has fallen victim to the economy and the workplace smoking ban approved by Ohio voters in 2006.

What rotten luck. They went under before higher taxes, mandated health insurance, inflated energy costs, and an easier to unionize workforce could save them. And they were that close.

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Boy, I'm still getting 5 or 6 hits a day on my Mark Guzheng Davis at Deutsche Bank post. I feel kind of good about being able to warn people away from this scam. (and I'm posting about it again so as to move myself up a branch on the Mark Guzheng Davis at Deutsche Bank Google tree -- even though I know that somewhere a Nigerian prince is cursing all lumberjacks because of me)

The sun unleashed a massive solar storm today (June 7) in a dazzling eruption that kicked up a vast cloud of magnetic plasma that appeared to rain back down over half of the sun's entire surface, NASA scientists say.

The solar storm hit its peak at about 2:41 a.m. EDT (0641 GMT), but the actual flare extended over a three-hour period, said C. Alex Young, a solar astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who runs a website called The Sun Today, in a video describing the event.

Yeah, sure. Well mister smarty-pantses, Al Gore just happened to be up at 2:41 this morning and guess what? He looked outside and it was still night time! The sun was still asleep when this so-called event happened. So don't try to tell us that there was a storm on the sun; and certainly don't tell us that the sun has anything to do with the climate.

Saturday, June 04, 2011

Anyone else notice how bare the shelves are in the Toledo hardware store where Obama popped in? Empty shelf space indicates business isn't booming. (that's a total of 5 boxes of Miracle Grow behind the prez; one or two of each size)

And this stop on the (re)election campaign trail was intended to highlight economic recovery. Ha!